Paper Moon: Partners in Crime

Essays—

Nov 26, 2024

The first thing we hear in Peter Bogdanovich’s tragicomic treasure Paper Moon (1973) is an old recording of the 1932 title song by Harold Arlen, E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, and Billy Rose, a reflection on the seductive power of falsity that keeps returning to the plaintive refrain “It wouldn’t be make-believe / If you believed in me.” The idea in that lyric is that true love has the power to transfigure the cheap and chintzy; it’s a sweet thought. But the first thing we see in the movie is the stony face of nine-year-old Addie Loggins (Tatum O’Neal), who is not about to be taken in for a single moment by wishful romantic malarkey like that. Addie is standing at the grave of her mother, who has been killed in a mill accident. It’s 1936, several years into a Depression that, in this part of rural Kansas, shows no signs of lifting. She is shortly to embark upon a journey with the small-time-iest and most scrounging of con artists, an itinerant salesman (Ryan O’Neal) with a ready smile. His name, he says, is Moses Pray. He is probably Addie’s father (we never find out for sure); reluctantly, he agrees to bring Addie to her aunt in Missouri, and to pay Addie back the two hundred dollars he has wheedled out of the man responsible for her mother’s death. Moze intends to be Addie’s teacher but winds up as her student; and though he fancies himself a better, smarter, shrewder thief than the irritatingly stoic youngster in his charge, he will spend most of the movie’s compact running time racing to keep up with her. She will eventually win his heart, if he has one, without even seeming to try. He will never know what hit him.

Paper Moon is many things: a road movie; a coming-of-age/getting-of-wisdom story; a caper comedy; an eye-level look at childhood, in all its wrenching disorientation and resilience, that manages to be both tough-minded and hopeful; and a tale about impoverished people in desperate times trying to make two and two add up to more than four. But one thing it refuses to be is an exercise in sentimentality. Moze, after all, is not just a grifter but one who exploits the vulnerability of his marks. He scans the papers for obits, then peddles cheap Bibles to the recently bereaved at huge markups by pretending they were ordered by the deceased as a final token of love. He’s nobody’s idea of a good guy—certainly not the movie’s.

Because Paper Moon was released at the start of a 1970s boomlet of Depression-era larks, it tends to get lumped in with the more eager-to-please films that came right after it, including Stanley Donen’s Lucky Lady, Bogdanovich’s own At Long Last Love, and George Roy Hill’s The Sting, also set in 1936, which opened eight months after Paper Moon and became a box-office, Oscar, and cultural juggernaut. But Paper Moon has little in common with any of those movies, nor does it pay homage to the films of the 1930s the way the same director’s smashing success What’s Up, Doc?, released a year earlier, did with its conscious nods to the screwball era. If anything, Paper Moon owes more to Bogdanovich’s 1971 breakthrough The Last Picture Show. Both movies, set in American small towns in the relatively recent past, are acts of defiant anti-nostalgia. Each is shot in black and white, but not in order to evoke the comforting world of old movies. Bogdanovich, the most cinephilic of all of the New Hollywood wunderkinder, came up as a film programmer at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The directors he most revered—Welles, Hawks, Hitchcock—used black and white for grit, for darkness, for the way it could connote reality. In Paper Moon, he takes that idea all the way; the result is a very funny movie that nonetheless looks as if it could have been shot by Walker Evans. (The cinematographer was the Hungarian émigré László Kovács, whose cool eye for alienated outsiders making their way across American vistas had already been tested in Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces.) The era that Bogdanovich brings to life in Paper Moon isn’t the good old days. The narrative unfolds as a series of hustles and negotiations in underpopulated towns where you can practically feel the dust kick up into your nostrils, against drab landscapes that don’t look as if they could cough up a spare blade of grass. The film doesn’t even give us the comfort of a score (an idea Bogdanovich says he swiped from Rear Window).

It’s a daringly counterintuitive approach to shooting a comedy, but Bogdanovich was at the height of both his creative powers and his self-confidence (the latter was rarely in short supply) when he made Paper Moon, and he knew exactly how to pull it off. It must be acknowledged that, among his many virtues as a filmmaker and an artist, generosity about his team of collaborators was not high on the list. Of the work of master screenwriter Alvin Sargent, who would go on to win Academy Awards for Julia and Ordinary People, he said, “It wasn’t too good, but there were two scenes in it that were wonderful.” One is the early confrontation in a café between Moze and Addie over the two hundred dollars; the other is the tour de force hillside breakdown of Trixie Delight (Madeline Kahn), an exotic dancer Moze has picked up, as she cycles through every weapon in her threadbare charm arsenal to try to win over the unbudging Addie. “Those two scenes were the only two scenes that remained after the rewriting,” Bogdanovich said. “But they were so damned good that I said to myself, ‘Jesus, I could do something with this.’ ” Whoever “did something” with it, the finished movie bears the hallmarks of Sargent’s best writing—very few screenwriters could match his ability to write short conversations that simultaneously dive deep into character and send the plot hurtling forward. For his part, Sargent said, “I knew the destination of the piece. You hear writers say, ‘It wrote itself,’ or ‘That one wrote itself.’ Well, I wrote it, but it helped me. I felt I knew the characters so well that I could imagine them in any situation.”

Just as integral to Paper Moon was the woman now widely understood (thanks largely to Karina Longworth’s 2020 You Must Remember This podcast series The Invisible Woman) to have been Bogdanovich’s most crucial creative partner. He and Polly Platt had married in 1962; they had separated by 1971, after Bogdanovich’s affair with Last Picture Show star Cybill Shepherd briefly turned him into a tabloid cliché—the director who left his wife for his leading lady. But Platt kept working with him; on Paper Moon, she served as production designer and costume designer, and was also a key, uncredited voice in everything from tone to casting. Bogdanovich later said that, because they weren’t getting along, he raced through the shoot and finished production four days early. (The movie, edited at a canter by Verna Fields, who went on to cut Jaws, feels brisk and no-nonsense but never rushed.)

It was Platt who came up with the suggestion that arguably made Paper Moon the enduring joy that it is. She and Bogdanovich had worked with Ryan O’Neal on What’s Up, Doc?, and Platt thought the actor’s young daughter, Tatum, who had never appeared in a movie before, might be right for the role of Addie, and urged Bogdanovich to consider her. The director later said of his two stars, with typical asperity, “I had to keep Ryan from killing her. ‘Goddammit, Tatum, would you learn your lines? Goddammit, I’m not going to do it again with her! Shit, we’ve done it twenty-eight times! Get the lines right, Tatum! Peter, I can’t do it again’ . . . Tatum was eight years old and didn’t have any idea what the hell we were doing, and she sort of cared less . . . She was in a world of her own, and sometimes her world and the one we were trying to create on-screen didn’t necessarily mesh . . . After about five weeks, she really got into it and started to enjoy the shooting and was much better.”

The result is a performance that, more than half a century later, remains on any movie lover’s shortlist of the greatest juvenile star turns in the history of American cinema. Her acting in Paper Moon may have taken some time to settle and focus, but it isn’t a trick of cajoling or of editing; Bogdanovich had the taste, the patience, and the discipline to let several of her best scenes unfold in long takes, from a rapid-fire quarrel in the front seat of a car to a beautiful, wordless scene in which Addie, alone in front of a mirror, puts on perfume and gazes at herself, adrift in wonder and sorrow, clearly seeing the mother she has just lost. O’Neal remains the youngest actor ever to win a competitive Academy Award. Her victory for Best Supporting Actress (over a field that included her brilliant costar Kahn, making an indelible impression with just twelve minutes of screen time) was a travesty only because she was in the wrong category; she’s the star of this show, and ironically, Bogdanovich was also able to elicit her father’s best screen work by tapping into his irritability and impatience at the prospect of being upstaged and using it in service of the character.

The elder O’Neal was doomed from the start: though the film is rich with supporting performances by veterans from John Hillerman (enjoying himself in dual roles) to Noble Willingham, Paper Moon is Addie’s movie—she’s the center of virtually every scene. As we watch her come to understand first that Moze is a con man, then that he’s not actually a very good one, then that she knows how to do it better, and finally that she kind of enjoys it, the movie, through Tatum O’Neal’s performance, becomes deeper and richer with every scene. Addie is a natural largely because she has the taciturn suspicion and keen observational skills of a lonely child; she can look at people and see their soft spots, and at the same time she can look around them and figure out in a millisecond exactly how much they can be taken for, and by what means. She also has, unlike Moze, enough of a conscience, or at least an intuitive sense of economic justice, to decide that some people should get an exemption. We start to see the movie, the characters, and the world through her eyes, which may be one reason Paper Moon was so popular among kids when it came out. It’s about an irresistible subject—a child competing with an adult and winning because of a skill she has taught herself, a skill you can only learn when adults ignore you and you have too much time to watch them and assess their various delusions and vanities.

Addie Pray, the novel by Joe David Brown on which Sargent based his script, tells a more expansive story than Paper Moon does. In Brown’s narrative, Addie and Moze get more ambitious, the cons get grander, the stakes higher, and the potential payoffs more tantalizing. The movie makes the wise decision to stop well before the book does; in many ways, it’s a film about smallness, transience, contingency. Bogdanovich’s use of frequent close-ups of Addie to make sure our perspective stays joined with hers is smart and strategic, but whenever he can, he pulls back—sometimes way back—to let us observe two characters in the wider world, a world that has incredibly little to offer those who travel through it. Brown’s novel is largely set in the South; after scouting locations, Platt suggested that Sargent relocate it to the Midwest, and you can feel what she was after—unvarying flatness and aridity, a sense of vast spaces that don’t suggest endless possibility, but rather impossible endlessness. In many scenes, including the ones that conclude the movie, we see distant horizons with almost nothing of beauty or hope or comfort to draw attention away from them, long, dull roads that show no promise of leading anywhere worth going, bare trees, scrubby earth, and a sky—a canvas sky, as the song puts it—that looks like it would be the same solid gray even if the movie were in color. The shot that ends Paper Moon wouldn’t be out of place in Wim Wenders’s Road Trilogy, made around the same time, or in an old Wile E. Coyote cartoon. Is it a road to nowhere, or to a better future? A barely functioning jalopy is tootling down it, away from us. It seems to be powered less by its motor than by the sheer will of the two people inside, hoping that a little make-believe, and faith in each other, will be enough to take them somewhere better.

Paper Moon: Partners in Crime

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